Dead Silent

by Neil White

  Chapter Forty

  Mike Dobson’s hands were tight around the steering wheel and he could feel the tension in his jaw as he ground his teeth.

  He glanced towards the glove box and felt a rush of excitement. It made his foot press a little harder on the pedal and so he had to slow down, worried about the speed cameras.

  It wasn’t rush hour, and the streets of Blackley weren’t busy with cars. He wondered whether he should wait until later, but the tightness of his chest and the warmth in his cheeks told him that it had to be now. The police were looking out for punters, it was true, but they would be looking for the late-night crawlers, the ones who were easy to spot. It was early for the girls to be working, but the warm weather made it easier for them to hang around.

  The brightness of the town centre petered out into the grubby fronts of tyre-fitters and plumbers’ merchants, and then he slowed down as he swung his car into the circuit of derelict terraces. He opened both windows and crawled along, checking in every direction for her, looking for that flick of dark hair and those skinny legs, his eyes flitting around constantly, checking the rearview mirror, always alert for the black uniforms hiding behind the unmarked car windscreen.

  He did two circuits and he couldn’t see her. He knew he was attracting attention, the car always did that, and so he pulled into the side of the road and kept watch instead. He was in a street that was dimly lit in winter, located near to an old scout hut surrounded by razor wire and an old basketball court that formed a magnet for young men doing street-level drug deals in the dark. But this was summer time, and so the days were long. The dealers operated indoors in summer, where indiscreet handovers would be less obvious.

  He stayed there for over an hour, just watching the street trade. There was a steady flow of taxi drivers talking to pale-faced young women in miniskirts, but still there was no sign of her.

  He was about to head back to his empty house, feeling like she was never going to show, when finally he saw her, emerging from a doorway along a street filled with boarded-up buildings, wiping her hand. There was a taxi parked on the road, a green Nissan Bluebird, and the driver drove off quickly; Mike guessed that the ride hadn’t cost her hard cash.

  He closed his eyes and tried not to think of that. He wanted the afternoon to be special, he had waited a long time for it, and didn’t want the remnants of another man with them.

  He started his engine and moved his car slowly towards her. As he got closer, she looked at him and he saw a spark of recognition, although her vision looked unfocused. He leant across the passenger seat and she bent down to the open window. The smell of cheap booze drifted into the car.

  ‘You again,’ she drawled.

  He looked down at her fingers. They were gripping the car door, as if she was trying to stop herself from falling over. There were beads of sweat on her chest.

  ‘I told you I would come and see you again,’ he said, his cheeks red with embarrassment.

  She shrugged and opened the car door, stumbling slightly as she climbed in. ‘Why?’

  ‘To spend some time with you,’ he replied.

  She gave a little laugh, although it came with a slur. ‘This isn’t normal boy-girl stuff, you know,’ she said, mocking him.

  He nodded. ‘I’ll pay for it, like always.’ He reached into his pocket and showed her the notes in his wallet. ‘I’ll give you two hundred pounds if you’ll spend a few hours with me.’

  She looked at it and took a deep breath. ‘It’s a lot of money,’ she said. She looked away and opened her bag to produce her cigarettes.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  As she looked at him, he saw how glazed her eyes were. He fought to hold back his anger. He had sought her out, had even brought her something, and she was like this, so early in the day.

  ‘I don’t want the car to smell,’ he said. And Nancy didn’t smoke, he thought to himself.

  She shrugged and closed her bag, and then looked straight ahead. ‘No funny stuff, you know that,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘So where do we go?’

  ‘Just for a drive.’

  She glanced along the street and licked her lips. ‘Can I trust you?’

  ‘You have up to now.’

  She paused as she thought about it, and then smiled. ‘You seem like a nice guy. Okay.’

  Dobson nodded and then pulled slowly away from the kerb.

  Chapter Forty-One

  I decided to take a detour and go back to Frankie’s house.

  For all Rachel Mason’s certainty that Claude Gilbert was a killer, I had spotted her interest when I mentioned Frankie Cass. And, if nothing else, she would want to know what he had been keen to tell everyone else. If he was going to be arrested, I wanted to get the arrest picture, and maybe a quote.

  But I felt no pleasure in being right as I drove up the hill to his house. There were two police cars outside and a silver Mondeo in front of them. I parked behind the squad cars and looked up his drive, letting out a groan when I saw Frankie being led out of the house. Rachel was holding on to one arm, his hands cuffed in front of him, a uniformed officer on the other side of him. I jumped out of my car and walked quickly towards them.

  Rachel noticed me as I got closer. ‘Am I going to start seeing you wherever I go?’ she said, a look of irritation flashing across her eyes.

  ‘It’s my story.’

  ‘It’s more than a story,’ she said, and continued taking Frankie down the drive. As he passed me, he shot me a look that was both confused and hurt. I had betrayed him.

  ‘But why are you arresting him?’

  Rachel stopped for a moment. ‘You saw his bedroom.’

  ‘You know I did.’

  Rachel smiled. ‘If you’d looked closer, you would have seen that not all the photos were of Nancy Gilbert.’ She rattled his cuffs, making Frankie wince. ‘It looks like we’ve found the person creeping around people’s houses. You know, the Crawler, or whatever the papers call him.’ She led Frankie away towards a waiting car.

  Oh great, I thought. That was Frankie, and I missed it, a guaranteed quick story, just to keep my byline out there.

  As I turned to watch them go, Rachel shouted over her shoulder, ‘It’s not always about you, Mr Garrett.’

  I put my hands on my hips, watching as Frankie was pushed into the police car, and then I turned and headed towards the front door. It creaked open slowly as I pushed it. I could hear people talking inside, just soft mutters, but the sound stopped as I went into the house. A shadow entered the hallway ahead of me. I let my eyes adjust to the dim lighting, and then I saw a face I hadn’t seen for a few months: Joe Kinsella.

  I nodded a greeting. ‘I heard you were around, Joe. It’s been a while. How are things?’

  He didn’t look surprised to see me. In fact, I couldn’t work out what he was thinking, as he gave me that usual enigmatic look of his, all dreamy eyes and soft-focus smile.

  ‘You keep popping up in the wrong places,’ he said.

  ‘So are you thinking he’s a suspect in the Claude Gilbert story too?’ I said. ‘Bit of a cliché, isn’t it? Lone oddball with a mother-fixation as the murderer?’

  He took my arm to lead me further along the hallway. ‘Is this an interview, or off the record?’ he asked, his voice quiet.

  ‘Off the record,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you if that changes.’

  He seemed happy with that. ‘Keep the Claude Gilbert connection quiet for now,’ he said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I’m asking,’ he replied. ‘And you call them clichés. We call them patterns.’

  ‘Frankie just misses his mother,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe, and so did Ed Gein,’ Joe said. ‘The voyeurism stuff will keep him busy for a day, and we can have a proper look around.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s him?’

  ‘We suspect it,’ he said, a half-smile on his face. ‘We received information that he’s been taking secret photographs
of women.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment and offered Frankie a silent apology. ‘And so you get to have a look around his house, just to see what he’s got on the Gilbert case?’

  ‘It’s a fringe benefit.’

  I laughed at that, but I noticed that Joe seemed serious. We’d met before, and so I knew how he worked, that he was as interested in the criminal mind as he was in the forensic evidence, those almost invisible trails that killers leave behind. He was embedded into the murder squad to look behind the forensics and work out the thought processes, to second-guess the killer. A killer can wash away blood, but behaviour is harder to conceal, because it is behaviour that guides killers. So he studied psychopathy. It kept Joe up to date with the theories, and for the police it was like having a consultant on a cheap salary. So, was Joe right—that clichés are just worn-out truths, but true just the same?

  ‘How far have you been into the house?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve just arrived,’ he said. ‘Rachel had the first look, and so she made the arrest.’

  I sighed. ‘You need to go to the top floor, to the furthest door.’

  He nodded, and then turned towards the stairs, inclining his head to indicate that I should follow him. As I walked behind him, I wondered whether I had just caught a murderer, or whether I had ruined the life of a local man just so that I could add a shine to a story that would be lining cat litter trays the day after it went out.

  But that was the game, and so I trudged slowly behind Joe Kinsella as he climbed higher.

  Mike Dobson crunched his car to a halt on a patch of shale by an old farm gate. They’d driven into the countryside, away from the shadows of the viaduct and into the honeysuckle and sunshine of the Ribble Valley.

  She looked across at him. ‘Are we here?’

  She was reaching into her bag for the condom, putting the package of baby wipes on her knee as she rummaged. He reached out and put his hand on hers.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. He smiled and patted her hand, and then pointed at the wipes. ‘Leave those behind.’

  She looked around, uncertain for a moment, and so he said, ‘It’s okay. It will make a change from some patch of concrete in Blackley.’ He reached past her and opened his glove compartment. ‘Spray this on.’ He was holding a bottle of perfume. Chanel No. 5.

  She looked uncertain but took it anyway. She sprayed it into the air, and then, once she was sure that it was perfume, and not some spray that would hurt her, she put some on her neck. ‘It’s nice,’ she said.

  He moved in towards her and inhaled deeply. He closed his eyes. The perfume took him back to a different time, and he felt soft fingers on his face and heard a giggle. He opened his eyes. She hadn’t moved. He reached out and traced along her breastbone with his finger, just a feather touch, and then brought it to his nose and took a deep breath. He looked at her. She was young, just like Nancy was all those years ago, with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose, and lips that were full and seductive.

  He stepped out of the car and went to the boot. When she stepped out, he passed her a plastic bag.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, swaying slightly, her hand reaching out to the car roof to steady herself.

  ‘Put it on,’ he said. When she looked doubtful, he added a ‘please’ and then turned away, not wanting her to refuse. He heard a rustle as she looked in the bag, and then there was a pause. He smiled as he heard her unclip her skirt, and he continued to look the other way as she stepped out of her own clothes. He could feel his excitement rising and he took some deep breaths to calm himself.

  ‘Like this?’ she asked eventually, and when he looked round, he gasped.

  She was just how he remembered Nancy. The sun behind her shone through her hair, the light breeze blowing stray ones so that they caught the sunlight, and her legs were visible through the flowered dress, the one that he had bought for Nancy all those years ago but never had the chance to give to her. The pattern was faded now, but his memory wasn’t, and it seemed like the last twenty-two years had hardly happened.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, and he stepped away from the car, another bag in his hand.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Joe went into Frankie’s attic room ahead of me. He turned around, tried to take in all the photographs pasted across the four walls. A uniformed officer came in behind me and whistled. Joe looked at me, and I saw an excitement in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in him before. Joe was always the quiet man, the thinker, but Frankie’s room seemed to make him agitated.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  He didn’t say anything. He moved close to the walls to examine the pictures, and soon spotted the Nancy Gilbert ones. The window was open, and so the old newspaper clippings fluttered in the light breeze over the computer screen, the screensaver a slideshow of photographs. Joe moved over to the window and looked down towards the care home, at Claude Gilbert’s old house. He thrust his hands into his pockets and chewed on his lip. When I joined him at the window, he turned to me.

  ‘Something isn’t right here,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Frankie?’ I said. ‘As a witness, or a suspect?’

  Joe took a deep breath. He stepped away from the window and returned to his scrutiny of the pictures, taking them in methodically, a couple of seconds with each one before moving on to the next.

  I turned round when I heard someone else come into the room. It was Rachel.

  ‘Frankie safely locked up?’ I said pointedly.

  ‘For now,’ she said, and she pointed at the photographs. ‘Those will keep him in a cell for a while.’

  ‘It will be worth all the effort then,’ I said. I didn’t feel like sharing in Rachel’s victorious mood.

  ‘We need to know about his mother,’ Joe said, interrupting us.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  He turned to look at me. ‘Obsessive loners don’t function well in the wider world because their upbringings are too strict, too restrictive,’ Joe said, and pointed at the pictures. ‘Look at those. Frankie is an obsessive, and he’s sexually repressed. He takes pictures of pretty women because he wants to get close to them but can’t; he captures them artificially, pastes them on the wall, so that it feels like he’s with them, that he’s surrounded by them.’

  ‘And you think that it is his mother’s fault?’

  Joe nodded. ‘Nearly always. Fathers affect behaviour with cruelty or brutality, give their children warped ideas about how to treat people, but mothers can do it by suffocation, by too much love, so that the son finds it impossible to love other women.’

  ‘So, if that’s applied to Frankie, how would he think of his mother?’ I asked.

  Joe sighed. ‘It’s a real paradox. Some part of him will feel hatred or resentment over the fact that she has harmed him psychologically, but at the same time it will become impossible to break out of his mother’s hold. He will worship her, and no woman he ever meets will live up to her, and so he hates his mother even more. That hatred can be transferred to other women.’

  I took a deep breath and wished a silent apology to Frankie. ‘Follow me,’ I said, and started to walk out of the door.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You said you had only got as far as the ground floor,’ I said, leading Joe down the stairs to the floor below, until we arrived at the door to Frankie’s mother’s room.

  I put my hand on the door handle. ‘You’ll want to see this then,’ I said, and gave the door a push.

  As it swung open, casting Joe’s face in a pink light, his mouth moved but no sounds came out. When he looked at me, I saw shock in his eyes.

  Then I heard a shout from above.

  ‘Joe, you might want to come up here. And you, Mr Garrett.’ It was Rachel.

  I went back up the stairs behind Joe and, when I went into the attic room, I saw that Rachel was pointing at the computer, a smile on her face. It was still running the slideshow screensaver, but now it was showing pictures th
at I recognised. It was my house, I could see my car at the front, and it was showing views of a window. Then some zoomed-in shots came up, and I felt my stomach turn over as I saw Laura, getting undressed.

  I looked at Joe, who looked embarrassed, and then Rachel smirked and said, ‘She really needs to learn to close the curtains.’

  I slammed the door on the way out.

  Mike Dobson jumped over the farm gate and held out his hand to help her over. Her touch was light, and he had to reach out to stop her from falling.

  As they walked, he kept hold of her hand. Her fingers were soft and warm, and her dress brushed against his leg, the breeze wafting the perfume past his nose. He looked down at his own clothes and wished he’d got changed out of his shirt and tie, but it felt more real like this, because it was how it was back then, stolen moments between appointments, or escapist afternoons when they knew no one was around. He kept his gaze down towards the floor, so that it still felt like Nancy, her fingers warm in his hand.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘Towards the river,’ he said, pointing ahead.

  ‘You’re not going to hurt me, are you?’ she said. ‘You seem like a nice man, but we’re a long way from anywhere.’

  He stopped and looked at her. She seemed embarrassed, reluctant, and he worried that she was going to bolt back towards the car.

  ‘I told you, I just want to spend some time with you.’

  She looked down as if considering her options, but then she looked up and nodded her agreement.

  The track followed the line of a low wall, sloping downwards, with long grass in the field that shifted in the breeze like the swell of the tide. Ahead, the long valley stretched away, the view broken by hedgerows and the occasional car roof as it travelled along the lanes that snaked between the farm tracks.